Byam Shaw: Progress at the Academy

"Silent Noon" by Byam Shaw

"Similar drawings to those required for entrance had to be repeated on admission, and upon acceptance of these, Byam Shaw became a student of the Royal Academy Schools. At this time I began studying landscape out of doors, and for a few years I saw very little of him. 

The routine at the Academy was in those days very strict. After the entrance exam came a test of two monochrome paintings of antique statues, and a head from life in colour, to pass into the life-class - which meant figure and head models on alternate days, painted in colour, the figure model at the evening class drawn in chalk. For instruction, there was a day-visitor and an evening-visitor, which changed each month, who were members or associates of the Academy. Among the most active amongst these were Hubert Herkomer, Luke Fildes, Val Prinsep, F. Dicksee, John Waterhouse, Alma Tadema, Solomon J. Solomon, and not unoften the President, Sir Frederick Leighton. 

At the lectures either the Keeper or the President sat in a high-back armchair in front of the students, and facing the lecturer. One evening Sir Frederick Leighton was in the chair at a rather prosy chemistry lecture and dropped off to sleep. A demonstration of what should happen to a certain pigment under heat having conspicuously failed, was greeted with ironical applause. This woke the President, who, mistaking its purport, joined heartily in the clapping.

In the winter of 1892, Shaw designed 'Rose Marie', conceived from Rossetti's poem, a remarkable effort for a student of twenty, busy with school work. It was painted in his father's old dressing-room, which was a very small one It was his first exhibited picture, being hung at the Academy of 1893. The hands and head were painted from his mother. 

He had now spent three years of regular work in the schools and, having passed for his second term of two years, reached the stage when students were encouraged to work more on their own. In a hired studio he began his first large picture (size 43" x 26"). 

'Silent Noon.'

'This close companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.'  Rosetti

In it we see a girl (painted from his sister) lying on the grass in the speckled sunlight, with a man in purple velvet sitting beside her. It shows the admiration he then had for John Waterhouse (R.A.)."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art & Life of Byam Shaw" by Rex Vicat Cole.)